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There's no reason they couldn't incorporate RES's features into Reddit. Actually if those were Gold options, they probably would get a lot more Gold subscribers (except that now RES already exists, so people wouldn't go that far out of their way).

Reddit's staff is small enough that you're probably right, hiring a front-end-only developer is probably beyond their means, they probably need everyone able to chip in on multiple fronts. But bigger teams absolutely do have front-end-only guys. Letting guys focus only on UI/UX grants that a level of polish that's difficult to achieve when someone is supporting the whole stack. It's also a natural delineation to combat the mythical man-month and divide up tasks.

Steve Sobel (the guy behind RES) does have some Python experience listed, so he might be a bit more relevant than just his front-end skills such as they are.

Strange. Doesn't work for me on Chromium/Ubuntu. And I've read corroborating accounts in the RES subreddit. As well as replies from the dev saying that he didn't have time to fix because he was unemployed and too busy looking for a job.

Be aware that any iDevice running iOS 5 or higher won't sync music with any Linux application powered by libimobiledevice because Apple apparently made some big changes to the database powering iTunes. This basically affects every well-known Linux music player, including Rhythmbox, Banshee and Amarok.

14.10.2011: iOS 5 music sync has a lot of changes. Linux users who want to sponsor the required implementations feel free to donate.

This is the biggest reason I stopped using them, I didn't realise exactly how locked down it was until I got an iPod touch. Vendor lock in is never a good thing and people are stupid to buy anything but Apps from the Apple Store.

When I first started using Linux, I was looking to buy my first MP3 player and found out how horrible apple was to deal with in the Linux world. It is a real shame, because they are so similar in a lot of ways. I don't think it would be difficult to add full support for Linux because of the design of similarity.

I discovered a site called anythingbutipod.com and used it to find a good player that did what I needed.

I'd love to switch away, but really...the iPod is still the best music player out there in terms of functionality. The queue in Google Play Music for Android can behave very strangely, automatically adding whatever current album you choose to play rather than acting as a sort of on the go playlist and letting the album act like its own playlist.

There're also some big quirks in the way it does searching, I've found. For example, I have a big six disc collection of Jazz curated by Smithsonian Folkways records, and being a compilation, it has a lot of different artists on it. Let's say I want to find all the music by Louis Armstrong, so I search for his name. When I click on the artist name, rather than listing individual tracks, it lists the albums they're members of, so you can't directly find the track, just the overall album. Which isn't very useful for a nearly 200 song collection.

Don't get me wrong. I'm buying whatever music I can from Google Play now, it's generally cheaper, and it integrates very nicely with my GNex and Nexus 7. But these little quirks in the player software really detract from the experience of trying to use it.

But the biggest knock for me is that my biggest reason for having a music player that's discrete from my phone is podcasting, and iTunes + iPod still blows everyone else out of the water, in my opinion, as far as podcast management is concerned (or at least it does on my first gen touch running iOS 3.13).

I really wish there were a better alternative, but nobody has stepped up to the plate yet with as good an integrated package. Honestly, what I'd really like is for Apple to just get it over with and port iTunes over to Linux finally. It may be getting rather big and bloated...but their interface is still my favorite.

I have looked at and tried (in store; I'm not made of money, so I can't buy things just to sample them) plenty of others, but none of them quite make the cut. If Google were to build better podcast functionality into one of their Android apps and improve the weird performance of their Google Play Music one, it'd be a no-brainer in favor of something Android-based.

But even then, really the only comparable Android music player hardware that I've managed to find is from Samsung, and it's awfully pricey. I suppose I could just find an old phone and do put Cyanogen on it...but for now, it still looks like my next music player that I buy will be an iPod nano. (The only thing that could sway me to the more expensive touch is the larger capacity.)

The alternatives (Luminance, Darktable, Rawstudio, Bibble) didn't really work out for me as I wanted the LR4 features. So I have been running VirtualBox in seamless mode instead. I created a Windows 7 VM. OSX is fiddly to install and doesn't play nicely in a VM environment. Then, install Photomatix and LR4 in there. I then launch any applications I need in seamless mode - that means that the VM is running but the application appears along with the rest of your desktop environment.

One thing that will make or break your experience with the above setup is a well powered machine. I found the most critical part was having enough RAM and an SSD. With those two, using a VM is a smoother experience.

Hmm, I should try LightRoom in a VM. I haven't even tried, because it was already sluggish in OS X natively, I figured it'd just be utter crap once virtualized. I hope I'm wrong, but it's already frustratingly slow for my reasonably small 30,000 photo library. My workstation even has 8 cores and 14gb of RAM.

An SSD for photos is something I should seriously consider I suppose. Prices are getting pretty reasonable for those.

Prices are becoming really good for SSDs. Nowhere near mechanicals but still very worth it. Right now with your and my setups (I have similar configuration, 8 cores+32GB), the limiting factor is the hard drive. Sluggishness you see is mostly due to the hard drive, though application-memory allocation is probably a factor too. However, the presence of an SSD does make a difference. If you have friends with SSDs, it is worth asking them and tinkering around with it for a while to see the difference.

I wouldn't bother with anything open source to try to replace Lightroom or Photomatix if you use those in a professional capacity. If it's just a hobby and you want to spend some time replicating your current workflow, go nuts.

Not sure on the state of Ubuntu and iPods working together if you use one in conjunction with iTunes. Rhythmbox or Banshee serve my needs well for music playing, though.

I don't know much about these, but there has been some suggestions on some alternatives. If I was you, I would install Ubuntu as a secondary OS try it out, see if it works, and if it does, then go with it. If it doesn't I would stick to what you have.

It also depends on why you want to make the change. If you have some good reason to change, then I would totally go for it, but if it is just for the challenge or what ever, you could just use Ubuntu as a secondary OS.